May 26, 2011

Questionable Quidity: the Preservation of Decay--Atomic Bomb Suits

Is there anything more revolting than this solitary, encapsulated, iron maidenesque survival sarcophagus and its promised hope of survivability?

Perhaps not. This patent application for an individual survival suit from 1958 gives us something to think about, perhaps gives us the cause to imagine what the world would look like from the inside of that portable evacuation chamber (that had its own attache case for storage).

The bomb(s) would go off, and there you would be, standing with your back against the wall, or laying in the gutter pressed against the curb, just another piece of the dead city, another piece of metal waiting to decay. I'm not sure what is going on in this scene, which while being crude is still steeped in a high-creep factor. I get the impression of slow time in these images, as though the atom-bomb-suited people have been there for a long time, though I suspect that we are seeing an urban area just after a blast. It is a wincingly bad scene.

(Why is it that when seeing Civil Defense films and etc from this period we see people ducking-and-covering from one bomb? Since the great majority of Americans lived in one of the 75 "essential delivery acquisitions" areas (I forget now the source for this phrase) it was exceptionally unlikely that people would be dealing with a single acquisitions implement, since the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons would've been at probably half-par with the U.S., which at this point (1958 or so) would be around 18,000.)

Here's another example of some unusual thinking on surviving nuclear holocaust, 1958, only these--while solitary--are not terribly mobile, even if they did come with wheels. (Didn't it bother anyone that something that was supposed to prevent you from flying glass and bricks and the terrestrial ring of fire could be moved around on such tiny wheels?) They look more like waste receptacles. Maybe that's what they would wind up being, if they were ever used for their intended purpose.

And another atomic bomb "garment-like" thing--this looks like it might actually be useful on airplanes, because most people who die in crashes do so from smoke inhalation...but providing one of these per person would be a bad flying vibe, just like seat belts (so ferociously resisted by Mr. Iacocca) were seen by the car industry as an unnecessary reminder of how dangerous cars were/are).

Anyway, the only way these things might be useful in times of such an emergency as atomic holocaust would be as a burial shroud. And since a bunch of people would (presumably) already be wearing them at the time of attack, the job of burying them would be that much less work, since they were already shrouded. Of course, that's assuming (a) that people would or could be buried, and (b) that there was anyone left to do the burying.